Icarus and Orpheus Take a Header

Patti Smith playing a professor of mythology on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, expounding on the meaning of the Minotaur and the maze for the edification of Vincent D'Onofrio's Goren, one of the few scenes in the show's entire run in which D'Onofrio (who's 6' 3') wasn't Pisa-towering over the person he's talking to.

There was a certain personal continuity to last night's episode, given that the first time I interviewed Patti in 19seventy-something, she was toting a huge, thoroughly thumbed-paged reference book on myth and imago.

Another personal thread to the past: Cynthia Nixon played a visionary, sleeplessly zealous director inspired by Julie Taymor--Nixon's expressive use of her hands was a hilarious bit of sympathetic mimicry--and in a smaller role was the actress Ilana Levine (whose face may be most familiar to fans of Seinfeld, where she played a gym receptionist in the classic "master of your domain" episode).

Nixon and Levine worked together on Robert Altman-Garry Trudeau's political verite satire Tanner '88, which is where I met them both. How young they were. How young we all were, though they were young young. I wonder if the casting director thought it would be piquant to put them in the same episode, or if it was just a fluke.

Meanwhile, the real Julie Taymor spoke publicly for the first time about her Spider-Man agon, and it would have been journalistically courteous of the Times reporter to have mentioned the name of the interviewer-moderator at the event whose questions made Taymor's answers possible: Oberlin College professor, cultural historian, and critic Roger Copeland. Her quotes didn't fall like feathers from above, after all, and The Hollywood Reporter managed to squeeze in Copeland's name within a much shorter item on the conference. The Times often seems very fickle about giving others their proper due.

In the article, Taymor talks about speaking with TV producer Norman Lear about the travails of focus groups and pre-testing.

Norman Lear and I had side by side urinals in the men's room during the intermission of The Book of Mormon, which I mention only to indicate what a small world it is and how everything at some point on this blog connects to me, and yet not in an egotistical way.

It was Greek myth night on TV, as the "Icarus" episode of L & O: CI was followed by the season finale of The Killing, which was titled "Orpheus Descending".